OUR PARENTS OURSELVES Sohier Hilliard: Fitchburg Art Museum
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Sohier Hilliard: OUR PARENTS OURSELVES Sohier Hilliard: Fitchburg Art Museum Our Parents, Ourselves September 7, 2019–January 5, 2020 Table of Contents Director’s Foreword 9 Parental Ties that Bind: Identity and Intimacy in Sage 11 Sohier and David Hilliard About the Artists 45 Exhibition Checklist 47 Acknowledgments 54 Director’s Foreword Over the last thirty years, the Fitchburg Art Museum has amassed a truly impressive collection of over 2,000 photographs. These range from nineteenth-century daguerreotypes to large-scale color digital prints of the twenty-rst century. And, in 2013, FAM launched a major exhibition program devoted to the works of contemporary New England artists. This show, Sohier/Hilliard: Our Parents, Ourselves, directly 9 reects both of these curatorial priorities, while also highlighting the work of two immensely important 10 photographers who signicantly expand upon the traditions of narrative and portraiture. Many thanks to the artists, and to FAM Curator Lisa Crossman for bringing them together in such an elegant and thought-provoking manner. Thanks also to Professor Rob Carr’s Fall 2019 Document Design class at Fitchburg State University for designing this beautiful exhibition catalogue. Nick Capasso, Director Fitchburg Art Museum Parental Ties that Bind: Identity and Intimacy in Sage Sohier and David Hilliard Placed together in one gallery, Sage Sohier’s and David More than documentation of each parental subject in Hilliard’s photographs of a same-sex parent seemingly daily routines, Sohier and Hilliard manufacture electric stage parallel worlds. Sohier’s photographs of her environments that make visible something completely mother, Wendy Burden Morgan, and Hilliard’s of his intangible yet universal: the fraught landscape of father, Ray Hilliard, are similar in their eorts to capture intimacy between a parent and an adult child. An complex parental subjects but were conceived interrogation of this landscape unfolds across these 11 independently of each other. Their connection is bodies of work, as the photographers probe the nature instead the product of Lisa Crossman’s curatorial of identity and its link to the deep bonds we share with project that highlights the shared themes between those closest to us. For Sohier, Wendy’s position as a Hilliard’s and Sohier’s series, in addition to each former fashion model and as part of a generation of women before second-wave feminism forces a chasm photographer’s individual vision. In Sohier/Hilliard: between them. Similarly for Hilliard, Ray’s ex-military Our Parents, Ourselves, lines between photographers, subjects, parents, and children are brusqueness and stereotypically masculine habits like heightened and blurred. Crossman, Sohier, and Hilliard bad shirts, cigars, and Playboy makes the two of them devised the exhibition and its title with this tension ostensible opposites. However, both photographers use between conuence and divergence in mind, so that their images to mine these gaps for deeper entanglement is underscored as the central force at understanding and connection with a parent and with work. themselves. Hilliard, The Lone Wolf, 1993 14 Sohier, Mum applying make-up, Washington, D.C., 1994 Placed together in one gallery, Sage Sohier’s and David More than documentation of each parental subject in Hilliard’s photographs of a same-sex parent seemingly daily routines, Sohier and Hilliard manufacture electric stage parallel worlds. Sohier’s photographs of her environments that make visible something completely mother, Wendy Burden Morgan, and Hilliard’s of his intangible yet universal: the fraught landscape of father, Ray Hilliard, are similar in their eorts to capture intimacy between a parent and an adult child. An complex parental subjects but were conceived interrogation of this landscape unfolds across these independently of each other. Their connection is bodies of work, as the photographers probe the nature instead the product of Lisa Crossman’s curatorial of identity and its link to the deep bonds we share with project that highlights the shared themes between those closest to us. For Sohier, Wendy’s position as a Hilliard’s and Sohier’s series, in addition to each former fashion model and as part of a generation of women before second-wave feminism forces a chasm photographer’s individual vision. In Sohier/Hilliard: between them. Similarly for Hilliard, Ray’s ex-military Our Parents, Ourselves, lines between photographers, subjects, parents, and children are brusqueness and stereotypically masculine habits like heightened and blurred. Crossman, Sohier, and Hilliard bad shirts, cigars, and Playboy makes the two of them devised the exhibition and its title with this tension ostensible opposites. However, both photographers use between conuence and divergence in mind, so that their images to mine these gaps for deeper entanglement is underscored as the central force at understanding and connection with a parent and with work. themselves. David Hilliard has photographed his father intermittently since the early 1990s, alongside evocative possessions, family members, pets, and environments. Sage Sohier photographed her mother Wendy between 2000 and 2014 (with one outlier in 1994) to explore transformations caused by aging and shifting family dynamics. The use of photography over time is a loaded choice in these cases, inherently invoking centuries-old traditions of portraiture and documentation. The photographic family portrait has its roots in the earliest days of photography itself. Queen Victoria—who is largely credited as the rst to harness and 15 popularize the new technology of photography in the mid-nineteenth century—used the medium to craft a specic royal image for herself as queen and for the royal family as it grew and changed. Photography’s ties to objectivity and to truthful representation (however dubious now) made it an indispensable tool for royals and commoners alike to record themselves, loved ones, and signicant moments across centuries. The photograph, more than any other visual medium, provides a sense of true-to-life representation and trusted preservation. Sohier, Mum and Laine in front of family portrait, Washington, D.C., 2011 18 Hilliard, Rock Bottom, 2008 With Sohier and Hilliard, however, the family portrait is expanded and enhanced in order to reveal dierent motivations for capturing loved ones in photographs. These portraits are not just about Sohier’s mom or Hilliard’s dad and their lives and personalities. By nature of the child-photographing-parent dynamic, Sohier’s and Hilliard’s complicated relationships to the lives and personalities of Wendy and Ray are always in play. In some images, like Hilliard’s Rock Bottom and Sohier’s Mum in her bathtub, Washington, D.C., the relationship is presented overtly, with Sohier and Hilliard themselves appearing in the compositions to quietly orbit the respective parent. These two images in particular highlight the simultaneous closeness and distance that exists between parent and child. In Hilliard’s Rock Bottom, the connection created by the gures’ matching tattoos is fractured by the expanse of empty landscape that divides them. In Sohier’s Mum in her bathtub, mother and daughter share the intimate space of a bath, but their gazes do not meet. The optical trick of the mirror extends the separation between photographer and subject innitely into the background. Sohier, Mum in her bathtub, Washington, D.C., 2002 Even when the photographers themselves are not pictured, conversations that produced hilarious images like their presence is implied as integral to the scenes. There is an Bleaching ritual, Washington, D.C.—but also points to undeniable sense that Ray’s comically unamused gaze in the multifaceted aims of these projects. These images are Bubble or the glint in Wendy’s eye in Back together with just as much about Sohier’s mother and Hilliard’s father as Robert, at Laine’s 63rd birthday dinner, Sebastopol, CA they are about Sohier and Hilliard themselves. were both fostered by and aimed at Hilliard or Sohier, David Hilliard’s use of the multi-panel format reveals his respectively; we, the viewers, just happen to be standing in interest in pushing photography beyond its the way. Sohier’s title for her series, Witness to Beauty, conventionalized status as an instantaneous medium. He highlights the integral role that she plays in the images. The has noted the way that people “unfold” over the course of word “witness” gives equal weight to both her mother’s being photographed and how his compositions show commanding presence and to Sohier’s observation of and “moments rubbing up against other moments.” These relation to it. These views of Wendy and Ray are crafted sentiments and formal choices indicate that the passage of 22 literally through the lenses of each parent’s child, making time is paramount to Hilliard’s work, as he seeks not just to Sohier and Hilliard integral to their understanding. On her document his subjects as they are but to also excavate and process for composing the images with her mother and discover the ways that they shift over time. In turning this sister, Sohier has explained: “Many of the situations we lens on his father across decades, Hilliard set out to explore photographed were based on memories I had from the contradictions of Ray’s character with the aim of childhood of things we’d done together. Before we took a understanding: how could Ray be simultaneously “the best picture, we’d discuss what each of us was going to do.” This and worst of things,” as Hilliard has phrased it, and how collaborative process not only breathes life into these does one engage with this paradox, particularly when images—you can almost hear the lively o-camera directly implicated as his son? Sohier, Back together with Robert, at Laine’s 63rd birthday dinner, Sebastopol, California, 2014 24 Sohier, Bleaching ritual, Washington, D.C., 2003 Hilliard. Bubble, 2017 blissful, as in Mum exercising in her pool, Washington, D.C.